What You Must Do with the Garden Now 
REMARKS ON THE PREPARATION OF THE SOIL, AND SOWING 
INSTRUCTIONS—TRANSPLANTING SEEDLINGS AND PLANTS— 
SUGGESTIONS FOR GARDEN ARRANGEMENT AND METHOD 
by F. F. Rockwell 
It is essential in planting or sowing to make the surface as fine and level as possible before operations 
A PRIL, with its fleeting sunshine and south winds, marks the 
advent of the outdoor season, and now is the time to take 
an inventory of the garden and its needs, if you are looking for¬ 
ward to a profitable year. 
First of all, there are the garden patches where the vegetables 
and annuals 
grew last year. 
As soon as the 
ground is dried 
out enough so 
that it will not 
stick when be¬ 
ing plowed up 
or spaded, have 
those attended 
to. If you are 
not familiar 
with the details 
of doing this 
work, refer to 
last nr onth’s 
House and Garden, where you will find the particulars of 
manures and fertilizers and breaking up the soil for both vegetable 
and flower garden discussed. That must, of course, be the first 
step in a great deal of your gardening, and see to it that it is well 
done. For this job you will probably recpiire help; you cannot 
get the real pleasure there is in gardening letting your gardener 
attend to everything except cutting the flowers, any more than 
you could enjoy a luscious, new cantalope by letting the cook eat 
it for you. 
Take a good look around and pick out the bare earth spots and 
corners in the grounds, or the beds and borders of perennials, and 
make a careful mental, or, better still, a penciled, note of them. 
Along with the note, make a signed and duly executed resolution 
not to let this spring go by without doing something to improve 
them. The hardest part of the job is to go back into the house 
and sit down and order what you see you will need. 
There are several classes of things which you will need. Seeds, 
both vegetable and garden ; these will have been, or should have 
been, ordered. Hardy peren¬ 
nials—a dozen or so of these, 
including some of the splendid 
new sorts, or the old favorites 
which you may not happen to 
have— will cost little, and will 
give you some results this year. 
Now is the time to think of 
such things as roses, flowering 
shrubs and bush and cane 
fruits. If you will only order 
them now, so that they can be 
shipped as soon as ready, and 
in the meantime you have a 
place ready to plant them, the 
job will be a very short one. 
Of course, the first step towards sowing or planting any of 
these things is to pick out suitable positions for them. Do not 
plant things that require full sunshine around at the northwest 
end of the house, where they will only get the tail-end taste of 
the day’s sunshine, and expect them to do well. On the other 
hand, do not take some bashful little flower whose 
natural habit it is to “blush unseen” within some shady 
glare 
copse, and stick it out where it will get the full 
Depth to plant depends on size of seed. Beans may be set in from 
two to four inches. The shallow drill on the right is for finer seeds 
of the noonday sun. 
In planting, the place, the time and the variety 
should be severally adapted. After the preliminary 
jobs of making out the orders and manuring and spad¬ 
ing up the garden and beds, the first thing to do when 
the proper day for planting does finally arrive is to 
prepare a suitable surface. With this job you can 
hardly take too 
much pains; and 
it is, I think, more 
frequently on just 
this point than on 
any other that the 
amateur falls 
down. It should 
make little differ¬ 
ence whether you 
are preparing to 
set out cabbage 
plants or to sow 
mignonette seed; 
that the planting 
or sowing, as the 
case may be, can 
be done more eas¬ 
ily and thoroughly 
is only one of the 
many arguments 
why yon should 
get the surface 
just as fine and 
If the earth is packed, make a hole with the dibber 
large enough to take the ball of earth and roots 
(282 ) 
